


Reflection

by rosepear



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood, Dark-ish, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Twinyards appreciation week, Vampires, hunter!Aaron, twinyards, vampire!Andrew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 04:10:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16509122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosepear/pseuds/rosepear
Summary: Beware the dark, Aaron’s mother used to say when he was but a little boy, playing with imaginary friends in the grass outside their shabby, run-down house.The dark is where the beasts are.





	Reflection

Aaron was walking home from a long day of treating patients when he registered abrupt movement from the corner of his eye. For most people, it would hardly warrant a second look – Aaron, however, had been trained to notice things most people wouldn’t, and he was moving in the direction the movement came from before he could consciously think about it.

He quickened his pace, enough to move quickly but not to look like he was running, and put a hand inside his coat pocket. The small silver gun he carried everywhere was safely wrapped in a cloth, and the familiar coldness of the metal made him feel just a bit surer. He sometimes thought of it as a companion of sorts – it had, after all, been with him through a lot, and the marks it bore told a story, one echoing through the scars on Aaron’s skin.

He ended up near a dark alley. The area was scarcely lit by a dying street lamp. It was quiet – too quiet. Aaron raised his free hand; it was as steady as always, as sure as a surgeon’s. His instincts screamed for him to act, so he took out his gun and chanced a look into the alley.

Once upon a time, the sight of a man being drained of his blood would have made Aaron freeze in shock. He would have watched the stray drops of blood flow down the body sluggishly,  _drip, drip, drip_ on the floor, forgetting how to breathe at the sight of sharp fangs stuck firmly in a straining neck. He would have screamed. He would have probably got himself killed.

But that was a long, long time ago.

Aaron was ready. He breathed in and out to slow his heartbeat down, made sure his hands were steady on the gun and aimed—

Only to be met with his own reflection.

He jerked, startled, as the one trapping the man against the wall turned around in a blink and looked Aaron straight in the eyes. Aaron stared back in surprise while his stray shot echoed across the street. The stranger’s face was clouded in shadows, but Aaron could still see him quite clearly: the same hazel eyes he saw every time he looked into a mirror, the exact same blonde hair, the slightly crooked nose and the sharp jaw… It was like looking at himself in a dream, confusing and just on the side of  _wrong_.

Faced with this image, Aaron could only hold on tighter to his gun and stare.

“What the—,” he started to say, but then the stranger let the body of the man he had attacked fall to the floor, limp and barely breathing, and moved into the light.

His gaze was intense and full of foreign fire, the kind that Aaron had never seen before, but one that resonated deep within his own soul. A flash of startling red, a sneer—

Before Aaron could shake off the disbelief clouding his mind or raise his gun once more, the stranger was gone and the alley was silent. The only sound Aaron could hear was the ceaseless pounding of his heart.

 

*

 

 _Beware the dark_ , Aaron’s mother used to say when he was but a little boy, playing with imaginary friends in the grass outside their shabby, run-down house.  _The dark is where the beasts are._

He recalled being afraid of the dark as a child – a result of his mother’s and his uncle Luther’s bloody stories. At first, Aaron had thought they were just that: stories meant to scare children into obedience. He had learned the truth, eventually, when the time came to follow in his family’s footsteps.

The Hemmicks were one of the most known (if not  _the_  most known) hunter families in the hunter world, with centuries of brutal but efficient work backing them up. Once upon a time, they had been the head of the Hunter Circle, and they were still considered something of an authority within the society. But times had changed; they weren’t in the Middle Ages anymore, where beasts would come in the dark of the night and take a villager or two away, only to leave them pale and bloodless to be found in a forest or a field. No, these were the modern times—more secure and even more dangerous—where vampires lurked quietly between men, as human-like as anyone else in both looks and manner, ready to strike whenever their bloodlust reared its ugly head.

Throughout the last decades, the number of vampires killed by the Circle had gone down and the number of children born into the families had dwindled as well.  Eventually, there had not been enough hunters to bother with formalities; thus, the Circle had disbanded. The hunter families had started working on their own, occasionally consulting one another. They trained their children, who in turn trained their own offspring, passing the bloody knowledge down generation after generation.

After all, the beasts were still out there – waiting in the dark, eyes flashing red and teeth sharpening, ready to strike when it was least expected.

Aaron had refused to train with his uncle until his mother’s fists had rained down on him one time too many, and he had finally relented. Luther Hemmick had trained him relentlessly, like it was his personal mission in life to see the day the world was purged of  _the filthy beasts_  – and Aaron had since realised that it was exactly that. Aaron had learned, had spent years under his strict eye, while his mother spiralled downwards, alternating between working in the morning and getting glassy-eyed in the evening from yet another one of her drugs or the alcohol she had quickly grown dependent on.

Sometimes, Aaron envied his cousin, Nicky, who had fled to Germany when he had had the chance. Sometimes, when Aaron’s arms were too stiff from hours spent with a silver gun in his hands, he wished he too was far away from the place he still called home only because he didn’t know anywhere better.

Sometimes, he would give himself a moment to think of the little boy he had once been, scared of shadows and so naïve, with less than a dozen bruises marring his skin. And he would mourn that boy – for he was long gone, and in his place now stood a man not nearly as ruthless as his uncle, but just as determined.

 

*

 

“Mother,” Aaron intoned, opening the door to her room.

It was a right mess; old cans of beer laid on the floor among pieces of plastic and left-overs from numerous meals. Aaron wrinkled his nose as he moved the trash around with his shoes to get to where Tilda Minyard sat in front of an old TV, eyes blank and empty like they usually were these days.

At the sound of his voice, she jerked slightly, though it took a while for her eyes to focus on him. Aaron was long used to the expression of disdain that more often than not appeared on her face when she looked at him. It had been like this even when he was younger, and he could never quite get rid of the feeling of inadequacy she could so easily provoke in him with a single look.

“Aaron,” she muttered, narrowing her eyes. “What is it?”

Aaron looked around the room again, and his arms twitched at the sight of white powder on the floor. He took a deep breath and met his mother’s eyes.

“There is something I need to ask you,” he said. He swallowed hard. “I need to know if—was there ever a child? Other than me?”

He watched in morbid fascination as his mother’s eyes widened – it was probably the most visible reaction he had got from her in months.

“So there was, then.”

Aaron’s heart pounded so hard he could feel it in his ears. He watched as Tilda avoided his eyes, and he felt something ugly grow in his chest.

“Tell me,” he demanded. He moved as if to shake her, but she grabbed his arm first and squeezed. Aaron couldn’t quite suppress his flinch; he wished one day to be rid of the instinctual fear that sparked every time she moved too fast – a residual habit from his childhood.

“You cannot tell a soul about this,” Tilda hissed and squeezed harder. “Not a single one. Do you understand?” Her eyes were the clearest he had seen them in a long time.

Aaron wrenched his arm away and stood well out of her reach.

She averted her gaze and said through gritted teeth, “There was another boy. Your identical twin.”

Aaron felt a sudden wave of anger surge through him.

“And you never thought to say a thing,” he spat. “Why? What was his name? What happened to him?”

She looked at him and sneered. “His name was Andrew,” she said, her voice empty. “I gave the boy away and he died.” Her face went blank again and she looked back at the TV.

Aaron knew this was as much as he would get from her; it was way more than he had expected coming here. He stood up, stumbling out of the room as a sense of vertigo overtook him. He shut the door firmly and breathed.

He had a twin. A dead twin who looked just like him. A dead twin named Andrew, whom he had seen less than 24 hours ago, who was—

Aaron put his hands on his knees as the world tilted dangerously to the side.

His mother was wrong, he realised. His brother wasn’t alive, yes – but he was not dead, either.

 

*

 

It took weeks to finally track him down. Weeks of looking in the darkest places, stumbling after the smallest trace. There was no sign anywhere of another boy like Aaron, dead or alive. The scraps of information he found led nowhere, and Aaron came across more dead ends than anything useful. He did not find an Andrew Minyard that could be his brother in any existing records.

What he found, however, was Andrew Doe.

Andrew Doe, born November 4th. Blond hair, hazel eyes.

Andrew Doe, a foster child, abandoned shortly after birth.

Andrew Doe, presumed dead after a fire that had burned down his last foster home.

In the end, it was pure coincidence that Aaron caught sight of the familiar figure—after all, not many people were as short as him, and he  _was_  actively looking—and followed it to the entrance of a nightclub, of all things.

“Hold up,” a bouncer said as Aaron tried to sneak past him to avoid the line. Aaron eyed his muscled arms and decided to step back. “You need a pass to go this way, kid. Otherwise, you get in like everyone else.”

In the end, Aaron ended up paying double the entry fee and getting in only marginally faster. Inside, he was immediately surrounded by the smell of sickly sweet alcohol and sweat. He wondered how many vampires were in the crowd and thought Eden’s Twilight was a strangely fitting name for a place like this. He looked around and sighed before trying to make his way through the mass of bodies on the dance floor.

Halfway through, Aaron felt an ice cold hand grip his neck and shove hard. He stumbled, and the hand gripped his arm instead, forcibly dragging him into an emergency corridor and into the night. He felt his heart pick up as he was shoved against a brick wall. When he felt a warm breath on his neck, he stiffened and clutched his gun in his pocket, getting ready to fight.

“I could rip your throat out and be done with you in a second,” a quiet voice murmured into his ear, and Aaron nearly chocked when he heard how similar it sounded to his own. “I do not take kindly to people following me, hunter.”

The vampire shook him once, and Aaron’s head hit the wall painfully.

“I will take an explanation now.”

Aaron swallowed. “Hello, brother,” he said quietly, raising his eyes from the ground and looking into ones so very much like his own.

For the first time, brother met brother, and they stared at each other in silence.  _Like two drops of water, indeed_ , Aaron thought, drinking in the sight in front of him.

“I am not your brother”, Andrew said, and every word was slow as if he was trying to stamp that information onto Aaron’s very soul.

But he would not be deterred so easily; he came too far to give up now. “You’re Andrew, aren’t you? We were born twins. We look exactly the same. Our mother—”

“Shut up.”

“—she told me about you, she—”

In a heartbeat, Aaron found himself barely able to breathe, neck straining against the wall, heart beating furiously against an ice cold grip. His blood sung _danger, danger, watch out!_

“That woman has never been my mother,” Andrew whispered. His eyes flashed red, and Aaron suddenly remembered what it was exactly that he was dealing with.

A vampire and a vampire hunter – two sides of the same dark, twisted coin. Them meeting should have ended in violence long ago: that first time in the alley. Aaron should have put a silver bullet through Andrew’s skull by now.

Instead, he couldn’t help but ask, “What happened to you?”

Andrew simply smiled, all sharp teeth and a dangerous glint in his eye; it was not a kind expression. His fingers against Aaron’s neck tightened in warning, and he struggled to breathe. “Do not follow me again, hunter.”

“Aaron,” he found himself wheezing out. “My name is Aaron.”

Andrew didn’t answer. Instead, he squeezed Aaron’s neck one last time and a second later, he was gone.

With his neck free from the crushing pressure, Aaron took in a mouthful of air and coughed. He leaned against the wall for support, waiting for his heart to calm down. The press of the silver gun against his palm helped ground him, and when he looked at his free hand, it was as steady as always.

He had found him.

Aaron had found his brother, and he had no intention of letting go.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my piece for day one of twinyards appreciation week. i'm not sure yet if i'll write for any other day/prompt, though i'd like to write something more about andrew in this universe. i guess we'll see!  
> also, i'm pretty sure i included all the warnings in the tags, but please do let me know if i missed something!
> 
> come say hi on tumblr [here](http://rosepear.tumblr.com)
> 
> thank you for reading!! ♡


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